In the Narodnik newspapers and magazines we often meet with
the assertion that the workers and the “working” peasantry belong to the
same class.

The absolute incorrectness of this view is obvious to any one who
understands that more or less developed capitalist production predominates
in all modern states—i.e., capital rules the market and transforms the
masses of working people into wage-workers. The so-called “working”
peasant is in fact a small proprietor, or a petty bourgeois, who
nearly always either hires himself out to work for somebody else or hires
workers himself. Being a small proprietor, the “working” peasant also
vacillates in politics between the masters and the workers, between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Statistics on wage-labour in agriculture provide one of the
most striking proofs of this property-owning, or bourgeois, nature of the
“working” peasant. Bourgeois economists (including the Narodniks) usually
praise the “vitality” of small production in agriculture, by which they
mean farming without wage-labour. But they are not at all fond of precise
figures on wage-labour among the peasantry!

Let us examine data on this question gathered by the most recent
agricultural censuses—the Austrian census of 1902 and the German of 1907.

The more developed a country, the more extensively is wage-labour
employed in agriculture. In Germany, out of a total of 15,000,000
wage-workers, it is estimated that 4,500,000, or 30 per cent, are employed,
in agriculture; and in Austria, the figure is 1,250,000, or 14 per cent,
out of a total of 9,000,000. But even in Austria, if we take farms usually
regarded as peasant (or “working” peasant) farms, i.e., those from 2 to
20 hectares (one hectare equals nine-tenths of a dessiatine), we will find
that wage-labour plays an important part. Farms from 5 to 10 hectares
number 383,000; of these 126,000 employ wage-workers. Farms from 10 to 20
hectares number 242,000; of these 142,000, or nearly three-fifths, employ
wage-workers.

Thus, small (“working”) peasant farming exploits hundreds of
thousands of wage-workers. The larger the peasant farm, the larger the
number of wage-workers employed, together with a larger contingent of
family workers. For example, in Germany, for every 10 peasant farms, there
are:

Size of farm

Family workers

Wage- workers

Total

2 to 5 hectares

25

4

29

5 to 10 ”

31

7

38

10 to 2O ”

34

17

51

The more affluent peasantry, who have more land and a larger number of
“their own” workers in the family, employ in addition a larger
number of wage-workers.

In capitalist society, which is entirely dependent on the market, small
(peasant) production on a mass scale is impossible in agriculture
without the mass employment of wage-labour. The sentimental catchword,
“working” peasant, merely deceives the workers by concealing
this exploitation of wage-labour.

In Austria, about one and a half million peasant farms (from 2 to 20
hectares) employ hall a million wage-workers. In Germany, two
million peasant farms employ more than one and a half million
wage-workers.

And what about the smaller farmers? They hire them selves out! They are
wage-workers with a plot of land. For example, in Germany there are over
three and a third mil lion (3,378,509) farms of less than two hectares. Of
these less than hall a million (474,915) are independent
farmers, and only a little less than two million (1,822, 792) are
wage-workers!

The very position of the small farmers in modern society, therefore,
inevitably transforms them into petty bourgeois. They are eternally
hovering between the wage-workers and
the capitalists. The majority of the peasants live in poverty, are ruined
and become proletarians, while the minority trail after the capitalists and
help keep the masses of the rural population dependent upon the
capitalists. That is why the peasants in all capitalist countries have so
far mostly kept aloof from the workers’ socialist movement and have joined
various reactionary and bourgeois parties. Only an independent organisation
of wage-workers which conducts a consistent class struggle can wrest the
peasantry from the influence of the bourgeoisie and explain to them the
absolute hopelessness of the small producers’ position in capitalist
society.

In Russia the position of the peasants in relation to capitalism is
just the same as in Austria, Germany, etc. Our “specific feature” is our
backwardness: the peasant is still confronted, not with the capitalist, but
with the big feudal landowner, who is the principal bulwark of the
economic and political backwardness of Russia.